U.S. Report Faults the Roundup of Illegal Immigrants After 9/11

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: June 2, 2003

WASHINGTON, June 2 — The Justice Department's roundup of hundreds of illegal immigrants in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks was plagued with "significant problems" that forced many people with no connection to terrorism to languish in jails in unduly harsh conditions, an internal report released today found.

The highly critical report from the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that F.B.I. officials, particularly in New York City, "made little attempt to distinguish" between immigrants who had possible ties to terrorism and those swept up by chance in the investigation. [Excerpts, Page A14.]

Justice Department officials said they believed they had acted within the law in pursuing terrorist suspects. "We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks," said Barbara Comstock, a spokeswoman for the department.

But the inspector general's report found that some lawyers in the department raised concerns about the legality of the tactics, only to be overridden by senior officials.

The report validated the concerns raised by some members of Congress and civil rights groups who charge that the Justice Department has cast too wide a net in the campaign against terrorism. The findings will probably provide legal and political ammunition to those seeking to curb the department's counterterrorism tactics, officials said.

"It feels good to have someone saying that we shouldn't have had to go through all that we did," said Shanaz Mohammed, 39, who was held in Brooklyn for eight months on an immigration violation before being deported to Trinidad last year.

"I think America overreacted a great deal by singling out Arab-named men like myself," he said in a phone interview. "We were all looked at as terrorists. We were abused."

Justice Department officials said that despite their disagreements with some of the report's conclusions, they have already adopted some of the 21 recommendations made by Glenn A. Fine, the department's inspector general.

Mr. Fine, appointed in 2000 by President Bill Clinton to what is regarded as a largely nonpartisan position, said that while he recognized "the enormous challenges and difficult circumstances" that the department faced after Sept. 11, "we found significant problems in the way the detainees were handled."

The inspector general initiated the report last year, in part because of public reports of mistreatment of detainees. Most major agencies have inspectors general, who serve as independent watchdogs with periodic reports on internal matters.

A total of 762 illegal immigrants were jailed in the weeks and months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as authorities traced tens of thousands of leads and sought to prevent another attack. Most of the 762 immigrants have now been deported, and none have been charged as terrorists.

The Justice Department has sought to maintain the secrecy of the arrests, fighting news organizations' efforts to gain access to deportation proceedings and for disclosure of more information about the detainees. Public information about the arrests has been fragmented; the report offers the most detailed portrait to date of who was held, the delays many faced in being charged or gaining access to a lawyer, and the abuse that some faced in jail.

The report showed, for instance, that nearly three of every four jailed immigrants were from New York City or New Jersey, many were Pakistanis, and most were arrested within three months of Sept. 11.

The report also found that immigrants arrested in New York and housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn faced "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" from some guards as well as "unduly harsh" detention policies.

A total of 84 inmates who were held in Brooklyn in terrorism investigations were subjected to highly restrictive, 23-hour "lockdown," the report found. They were limited to one phone call a week, and they were put in handcuffs, leg irons and heavy chains any time they moved outside their cells, according to the report.

And because of a "communication blackout" in the weeks after Sept. 11, families of some inmates in the Brooklyn facility were told their relatives were not housed there.

The highly restrictive conditions and long delays in processing cases and giving suspects access to lawyers appeared to differ markedly from policies before Sept. 11, according to government officials and advocates for immigrants. Prior to Sept. 11, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had 24 hours to decide about charging an illegal immigrant, but six days after the attacks, the Justice Department gave itself an indefinite time period because of the "extraordinary circumstances."

Immigration officials sometimes did not notify prisoners of the charges against them for more than a month, though the report said that the goal in the Sept. 11 investigation was to notify prisoners within three days. The average wait for those arrested in New York City and housed in Brooklyn was 15 days, the report said.